Amazon.com, Inc. announced on Wednesday that it reached an
agreement with Audible, Inc. to buy out the digital spoken word
business. The purchase will cost Amazon.com about $11.50 per
share, totaling roughly $300 million. This will include Audible’s
cash and short-term investments at closing.

Audible.com offers a massive range of audio books from top
authors, as well as a library of newspapers, magazines, television
and radio programs, and original programming. The website hosts
over 80,000 programs throughout the U.S., U.K., Germany and France.
Some of the major authors and sources include, Stephen King, Thomas
Friedman, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Charlie Rose.

"This deal brings together two pioneering companies that
share a long history of ceaseless focus on improving the customer
experience," said Donald Katz, founder and chief executive of
Audible.com. "We are very excited to be joining a company as
innovative as Amazon.com."

It looks like Amazon is focusing on the digital music market with
this purchase, and its recent move to take its DRM-free digital music
download service international.

The acquisition is expected to close by the second quarter of
2008.

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Agreed 100%. When that happens, I'll be an Amazon digital music downloader. The fact that MP3s are lossy is the only thing standing in the way of my purchase of them. In fact, I'd even go a step further and suggest that they start offering true 24 bit music... finally. 16 bit sucks. I don't know about you guys - but some records really kick CD butt. One artist that comes to mind is Janis Joplin. She sucks on CD, rocks on vinyl. Somehow the soul of her music and her voice comes across better on the black vinyl.

This would be a major milestone that would officially render the CD dead...being able to download something that is HIGHER quality than a regular CD! Not to mention immediately render iTunes downloads, even lossless iTunes downloads, as obsolete. Amazon, are you listening?

I hear this comment from so many people who used to complain about legal digital music. Now they have moved on to a different excuse not to buy music. I doubt we will see loseless for a long time but when it does come, I am sure another excuse for many will bubble up. I think it is time for people just to admit that they feel guiltless in stealingn music because for most of them (sounds like you are not one of them), it is the price that stands in the way and none of their other excuses really have any bearing whatsoever.

I have 200 iTunes songs and only a handful of them are in their Plus format. I vaguely remember Steve Jobs saying at launch that he expects that 80% of their library would be iTunes plus by the end of 2007. What happened? Seems that all the labels are going DRM free with Amazon. What is going on with Apple? And I am all about higher quality. The Apple DRM does not affect me so much because the iPod is the best mp3 player if you ask me. If it was a crappy player, then the Apple DRM might annoy me.

quote: I hear this comment from so many people who used to complain about legal digital music.

I've actually never tried to buy an mp3. My experience refers to Yahoo's Internet radio service. I paid for a subscription. Most music, especially 'boom box' music which is made for inferior music systems, is just fine. However, I find that some music will clip. Zero 7 or Emiliana Torrini get clipped in particular with sounds from bell-like instruments. For whatever reason the name of the instrument eludes me. I've noticed this also can happen for orchestral music. Anything where the must has a wide dynamic range. Why would I pay 99 cents for a clippy audio?

Lossless would sure be nice however I doubt we will see that for an extremely long time.Right now Amazon's service is 256kb music. This is a far cry from many mp3 services that were 128kb for a very long time. 256 is a very acceptable bitrate to have. I personally use 320kb mp3's for all my personally ripped sansa music but 256 is more than acceptable if you ask me. They have come a long way. Look at napster/Itunes rates and you will see they offer a better quality drm free music.